Sea Elephant
In the warm shallow seas of the Wumbian divide, a mother sea elephant leisurely leads her young calf through coastal waters in search of the kelp, sea grasses and sargassum upon which she has evolved to feed. In these very shallow waters, the manatee-like sea mammals have only a few predators to fear - notably the sea panther, which roams here only infrequently - but for the habitat's much smaller inhabitants there if never such a time to relax; all around her, dozens of newborn phytosaurs have hatched in the mangroves. Many were taken by birds and other predators on their first mad dash to the sea, and even now the lucky ones who made it to open water are not yet safe as an opportunistic marine hoptoad takes advantage of powerful crushing jaws normally used to glean molluscs from their shells to vary its diet with a bit of reptile prey. Much too small to capture an adult, in just a few years it may find itself in a very different position as its would-be prey approaches eight feet in length as one of the coastal forests' most abundant midsize hunters. One of the most unique aquatic tetrapods of the Wumbian divide is also one of its only non-rodentian true mammals. Growing up to ten feet long and weighing as much as 1,200 pounds, the Wumbian Sea Elephant is one of Sheatheria's last surviving proboscideans. A descendant of very primitive hippopotamus-like elephant ancestors which reached Sheatheria in the Eocene, they are almost entirely aquatic, being almost entirely incapable of terrestrial movement. While Earth's elephants would eventually go on to leave their ancestral swampy habitats and take over the land as some of the largest mammals ever to live, on Sheatheria - rife with competition and a very different environment - their diversity would never truly take off, with the majority of forms remaining primitive and pig-like mammals, low-slung to the ground and fond of wetland environments. Today the only surviving lineage is the one which ironically took this path as far in the opposite direction to Earth pachyderms and possible and became almost wholly marine, converging closely upon the dugongs and manatees of our world, yet with a distinctly elephantine trunk. Convergently evolved and utilized, as do some modern elephants at times, this organ is used predominately as a snorkel but also to pull aquatic plants from seabed to mouth. Sea elephants occur across three genera and approximately thirty-one species across the tropics and subtropical oceans of the southern hemisphere of Sheatheria. Fundamentally they are all similar to one another as aquatic, social herbivores, varying mainly in size and coloration. From the small fifty-pound Red-tufted mangrove sea elephant of Wumbia's inland rivers to the thirty-eight foot-long black and white giant known as the Eclypsian Sea Elephant which travels in immense, nomadic pods along the northern Aenvarnan coast, grazing on immense sea lily beds, they comprise all of the planet's surviving proboscidean diversity. Giving birth at sea, they have given up all ties to the shore and its dangers, finding safety in ocean in large herds from which they disband only to calve in shallow coastal inlets where they will stay with their young for several weeks until they are strong enough to keep afloat in more open waters. Young grow quickly in all species, attaining adult size in three to four years, but require several years further to fully learn all they need to know before they may go off on their own. Similarly to surviving Earth elephants, sea elephant society is matriarchal in all living species, with young males pushed from the herd to join bachelor groups at sexual maturity and from there permitted access only when females come into estrus. Only a few species regularly lead solitary lives, both of them exceedingly large and with less to fear from oceanic predators than most species, which may fall prey to hunters as diverse as foons, prawnwhales, marine tyrannosaurs and, in the case of the very young, large frogatebirds which may descend upon them from the sky and hoist them right out from beside their mothers and away into the sky. = by Sheather888 = Category:What if the Asteroid Missed? Category:Elephants Category:Fandom Category:Herbivores